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Monday, 8 February 2010

District 9 Concept Art - Dropship

The Dropship from District 9 was developed very quickly. Just a few concept drawings, all of the same design and it was on it's way into the film.

That's a pretty rare occurrence in film design.

Above you can see one of the early sketches that nailed down the silhouette and angular form, followed by a paint-over from a later stage of an in-production film model.

This quick concept sketch shows concepts like the modular slave hold, mimicking an insectile abdomen at the rear of the ship.
The idea was that the Dropship would carry various modular containers and in this case held a prison like container for the worker aliens.

The Embassy VFX created the first model from my super basic, quasi-retarded Sketchup mess, but I needed to do this paint-over to illustrated details and construction that weren't evident in the first concept drawings.

In the end, Weta Digital handled most of the Mothership and Dropship scenes in the film and added even further detail so that it held up when the camera got very close.

I loved the design of the dropship in D9! It was so cool to see it lift off the ground. The way it was shot in the movie made me nearly forget that it wasn’t REAL, that there was nothing there when they were filming. The visual effects in D9 are definitely a huge factor why it’s a movie that South Africa can be proud of.

Dr. Grordbort'sis a retro-science fiction universe of sex, satire and violence.Ok, so maybe there's no sex in it, but there are tons of pictures of ridiculous looking aliens getting their brains disintegrated so stop whining already.